From the very first moments, American
bourgeois propaganda has likened the horrific terrorist attack on
the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September to the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941. This comparison
is laden with considerable psychological, historical and political
impact, since it was Pearl Harbor that marked American
imperialism's direct entry into the Second World War. According to
the current ideological campaign presented by the American
bourgeoisie, especially its mass media, the parallels are simple,
direct, and self-evident:

1) In both instances, the US was victimized
by a treacherous surprise attack, taken completely off guard. In
the first instance there was the treachery of Japanese
imperialism, which cynically pretended to negotiate with
Washington to avoid war but plotted and unleashed an attack
without warning. In the current instance, the US was victimized by
fanatical Islamic fundamentalists, who took advantage of the
openness and freedom of American society to commit an atrocity of
unprecedented proportions, and whose evilness places them outside
the bounds of civilized society.

2) In both instances the casualties inflicted
by the surprise attack were staggering, arousing popular outrage.
At Pearl Harbor the death toll was 2403, mostly American military
personnel. At the Twin Towers the death toll was far worse, nearly
6,000 innocent civilians.

3) In both instances, the attacks backfired
on the perpetrators. Rather than terrifying or plunging the
American nation into defeatism and quiet submission, Pearl Harbor
and the Twin Towers instead aroused the deepest patriotic fervor
in the population, including the proletariat, and thereby
permitted the mobilization of the population behind the state for
protracted imperialist war.

4) In the end, it is the goodness of the
American democratic way of life, and its military strength, that
prevails over evil.

Like all bourgeois ideological myths,
whatever the elements of truth that offer superficial credibility,
this tale of two tragedies, sixty years apart, is laced with
half-truths, lies, and self-serving distortion. But this is no
surprise. The politics of the bourgeoisie as a class are based on
lies, deception, manipulation, and manoeuvre. This is particularly
true when it comes to the difficult task of mobilizing society for
all out war in modern times. The basic elements of the
bourgeoisie's ideological campaign are completely at odds with
both historical and present day realities. There is considerable
evidence that the bourgeoisie was not taken by surprise in either
case, that the bourgeoisie cynically welcomed the massive death
toll in both cases for purposes of political expediency in regard
to the implementation of its imperialist war aims, and other long
range political objectives.

The different characteristics of war
in ascendance and decadence

Since both Pearl Harbor and the World Trade
Center attacks have been utilized by the bourgeoisie to rally the
US population for war, it is necessary to examine briefly the
political tasks encountered by the bourgeoisie in preparing for
imperialist war in the epoch of capitalist decadence. In
decadence, war has taken on significantly different
characteristics as compared to wars during the period when
capitalism was an ascending, historically progressive system. In
the ascendant period, wars could take on a progressive role, in
terms of making possible the further development of the productive
forces. In this sense the Civil War in the US, which served to
destroy the anachronistic slave system in the southern states, and
unleashed the full scale industrialization of the US, or the
various national wars in Europe that resulted in the creation of
modern, unified nation states, which in turn provided the optimal
framework for the development of the national capital in each
country, could be seen as historically progressive. In general,
these wars could be restricted largely to the military personnel
involved in the conflict, and did not entail the wholesale
destruction of the means of production, the infrastructures, or
populations of the respective combatant powers.

Imperialist war in the epoch of capitalist
decadence is characterised by sharply different features. Whereas
national wars in ascendance could lay the basis for qualitative
strides in the development of the productive forces, in decadence
the capitalist system itself has already reached the zenith of its
historic development, and this progressive aspect is no longer
possible. Capitalism has accomplished the extension of the world
market, and all the extra-capitalist markets, which facilitated
the expansion of global capitalism, have been integrated into the
capitalist system. For the various national capitals the only
avenue for expansion now is at the expense of a rival - to seize
territory or markets controlled by its adversaries. The
heightening of imperialist rivalries leads to the development of
imperialist alliances, setting the stage for generalised
imperialist war. Far from being confined to combat between
professional militaries, war in decadence requires a total
mobilisation of society, which in turn gives rise to a new form of
state - state capitalism - which functions to exert total control
over all aspects of society, in order to rein in the class
contradictions that threat to explode society, and at the same
time coordinate the mobilization of society for modern all-out
war.

No matter how much it has successfully
prepared the population for war on the ideological level, the
bourgeoisie in decadence cloaks its imperialist wars in the myth
of victimization and self-defense against aggression and tyranny.
The reality of modern warfare, with its massive destruction and
death, with all the facets of barbarism that it unleashes on
humanity, is so dire, so horrific, that even an ideologically
defeated proletariat, does not march off to the slaughter lightly.
The bourgeoisie relies heavily on manipulating reality to create
that illusion that it is a victim of aggression, with no choice
but to fight back in self defense. The necessity to defend the
fatherland or the motherland, as the case may be, against
aggression and external tyranny, not the real imperialist motives
that drive capitalism towards war, are offered up as justification
for the conflict. No one can really succeed in mobilizing a
population around the slogan of "let's oppress the world
under our imperialist thumb at any costs." The state control
over the mass media in decadent capitalism facilitates the mass
brainwashing of the population with all kinds of propaganda and
lies.

The American
bourgeoisie has been particularly adept at this victimization ploy
throughout its history, even before the onset of capitalist
decadence in the early part of the 20th
century. Thus for example, "Remember the Alamo," was the
slogan of the Mexican War of 1845-48. This war cry immortalized
the "massacre" of 136 American rebels in San Antonio,
Texas in 1836, then a part of Mexico, by the Mexican forces led by
Gen. Santa Ana. Of course, the fact that the "blood thirsty"
Mexicans had repeatedly offered terms of surrender, and permitted
women and children to evacuate the Alamo fortress before the final
battle, did not prevent the American ruling class from imbuing the
Alamo defenders with an aura of martyrdom, and the incident served
the bourgeoisie well in mobilizing support for a war that
culminated in the American annexation of much of what today
constitutes the US southwest.

Similarly, the suspicious explosion aboard
the battleship Maine in Havana harbor in 1898 served as the
pretext for the Spanish-American war in 1898, and gave rise to the
slogan "Remember the Maine." More recently in 1964, an
alleged attack on two US gunboats in waters off the Vietnamese
coast was used as the basis for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution,
adopted by the American Congress in the summer of 1964, which,
while not a formal declaration of war, provided the legal
framework for American intervention in Vietnam. Notwithstanding
the fact that the Johnson administration knew within hours that
the reported "attack" on the Maddox and the Turner Joy
never happened, but was the result of error by nervous young radar
officers, they still pushed the combat authorization legislation
through Congress to provide legal cover for a war that would drag
on until the fall of Saigon to Stalinist forces in 1975.

It is true that the bourgeoisie used the
attack at Pearl Harbor to rally a hesitant population to the war
effort, just as the bourgeoisie today is using the 11 September
atrocity to mobilize support for still another war effort. But the
question remains as to whether in either instance the US was taken
by "surprise," and to what degree the machiavellianism
of the US bourgeoisie was involved either in provoking or allowing
the attacks to occur in order to take political advantage of the
ensuing popular outrage.

The machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie

All too often when the ICC denounces the
machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie, our critics accuse of us of
lapsing into a conspiratorial view of history. However their
incomprehension in this regard is not just a misunderstanding of
our analysis, but- even worse - falls prey to the ideological
claptrap of bourgeois apologists in the media and academia whose
job it is to denigrate those who try to ascertain the patterns and
processes within bourgeois political, economic and social life as
irrational conspiracy theorists. However, it is not even
controversial to assert that "lies, terror, coercion,
double-dealing, corruption, plots and political assassination"
have been the stock in trade of exploitative ruling classes
throughout history, whether in the ancient world, feudalism or
modern capitalism. "The difference was that patricians and
aristocrats 'practiced machi-avellianism without knowing it,'
whereas the bourgeoisie is machiavellian and knows it. It turns
machiavellianism into an 'eternal truth,' because that's how it
lives: it takes exploitation to be eternal" ("Why
the bourgeoisie is Machiavellian" International Review
n°31, 1982 p. 10). In this sense lying and manipulation, a
mechanism employed by all preceding exploiting ruling classes,
have become central characteristics of the political mode of
functioning for the modern bourgeoisie, which, utilizing the
tremendous tools of social control available to it under the
conditions of state capitalism, takes machi-avellianism to a
qualitatively higher stage.

The emergence of state
capitalism in the epoch of capitalist decadence, a state form
which concentrates power in the hands of the executive branch,
particularly the permanent bureaucracy, and gives the state an
increasingly totalitarian control over all aspects of social and
economic life, has provided the bourgeoisie with even greater
mechanisms to implement its machiavellian schemes. "At the
level of organizing to survive, to defend itself - here, the
bourgeoisie has shown an immense capacity to develop techniques
for economic and social control way beyond the dreams of the
rulers of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the bourgeoisie
has become 'intelligent' confronted with the historic crisis of
its socio-economic systems" ("Notes on the
Consciousness of the decadent bourgeoisie" International
Review n°31, 4th
quarter 1982, p. 14). The development of a mass media completely
integrated under state control, whether through formal juridical
means or more flexible informal methods, is a central element in
the machiavellian scheming of the bourgeoisie. "Propaganda
- the lie - is an essential weapon of the bourgeoisie. And the
bourgeoisie is quite capable of provoking events to feed this
propaganda, if need be" ("Why the bourgeoisie is
Machiavellian" p. 11). American history is jammed with myriad
examples, ranging from the relatively mundane everyday obfuscation
to much more historically significant manipulations. An example of
the former type might include the 1955 incident in which
presidential press secretary James Hagerty engineered a fake event
to cover up the incapacitation of President Eisenhower, who had
been hospitalized in Denver, Colorado following a heart attack.
Hagerty arranged for the entire Cabinet to travel 2000 miles from
Washington to Denver to create the illusion that the president was
well enough to preside over a cabinet meeting, even though no such
meeting occurred. An example of the latter might include in 1990
manipulation of Saddam Hussein when the American ambassador to
Iraq, told Saddam that the US, wouldn't intervene in the border
dispute between Iraq and Kuwait, tricking Saddam into believing he
had been give a green light from US imperialism to invade Kuwait.
Instead the invasion was used by the US as the pretext for the
1991 war in the Persian Gulf, as a means to reassert its status as
the only remaining superpower in the wake of the Stalinist
collapse, and the ensuing disintegration of the western bloc.

This is not to say all
events in contemporary society are necessarily predetermined by
the secret decision making of a small circle of capitalist
leaders. Clearly, factional disputes do occur within the leading
circles of capitalist states, and the results of such disputes are
not forgone conclusions. Nor is the outcome of confrontations with
the proletariat in the heat of the class struggle always under the
thumb of bourgeoisie. And even with planning and manipulation,
accidents of history can also occur. However, the critical point
to understand is that even though as an exploiting class, the
bourgeoisie is incapable of a complete, unified consciousness,
accurately understanding the functioning of its system and the
historical dead-end that it offers humanity, it is conscious of
the deepening social and economic crisis of its system. "At
the heights of the state machine it is possible for those in
command to have some kind of general picture of the situation and
what options are realistically open to them to confront it"
("Notes on the consciousness?" p. 14). Even with an
incomplete consciousness, the bourgeoisie is more than capable of
formulating strategy and tactics, and using the totalitarian
control mechanisms of state capitalism to implement them. It is
the responsibility of revolutionary Marxists to expose this
machiavellian manoeuvering and lying. To turn a blind eye to this
aspect of the ruling class offensive to control society is
irresponsible and plays into the hands of our class enemies.

Machiavellianism of the American ruling
class at Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor offers an excellent example of
bourgeois machiavellianism at work. We have the benefit of more
than half of century of historical research, and a number of
military and opposition party-controlled investigations to draw
on. According to the official version of reality, 7 December 1941
was "a day that will live in infamy", as
President Roosevelt characterized it. It was used as a means to
mobilize public opinion for war. It is still portrayed this way in
the capitalist media, schoolbooks and popular culture, despite
considerable historical evidence that demonstrates that the
Japanese attack was consciously provoked by American policy; the
attack did not come as a surprise to the American government and a
conscious policy decision was made at the highest levels to permit
the attack to occur and to sustain significant losses of life and
naval hardware, as a pretext to secure America's entry into the
Second World War. A number of books and considerable material on
the Internet have been published on this history1.
Here we will review some of the highlights to illustrate the
operational aspects of machiavellianism.

The Pearl Harbor events
unfolded as the US was moving closer and closer to intervention in
World War II on the side of the Allies. The Roosevelt
administration was anxious to enter the war against Germany, but
despite the fact that the American working class was firmly
trapped in the grips of a trade union apparatus (in which the
Stalinist party played a significant role), imposed under state
authority to control the class struggle in all key industries, and
was imbued with the ideology of anti-fascism, the American
bourgeoisie still faced strong opposition to war within the
population, including not only the working class, but even large
parts of the bourgeoisie itself. Public opinion polls showed 60%
opposed to entering the war before Pearl Harbor, and the "America
First" campaign and other isolationist groups had
considerable support within the bourgeoisie. Despite demagogic
political pledges to keep America out of a European war, the
Roosevelt administration searched furtively for an excuse to join
the fighting. The US violated its own self-declared neutrality to
an increasing degree, by offering aid to the Allies, and shipping
vast amounts of war material under the Lend Lease program. The
administration hoped to provoke Germany into launching an attack
against American forces in the North Atlantic that could serve as
a pretext for American entry into the war. When German imperialism
failed to fall for the bait, attention switched to Japan. The
decision to impose an oil embargo against Japan and the transfer
of the Pacific fleet from the West Coast of the US to a more
exposed position in Hawaii served to provide motive and
opportunity for Japan fire the first shots against the US, and
thereby provide the pretext for direct American intervention in
the imperialist war. In March 1941, a secret Navy Department
report predicted that if Japan decided to attack the US, it would
come at Pearl Harbor in an early morning raid launched from
aircraft carriers. In June 1941 presidential advisor Harold Ickes
drafted a memo to the president when Germany first attacked
Russia, suggesting, "There might develop from the
embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it not
only possible but easy to get into this war in an effective way".In October Ickes wrote, "For a long time I have
believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of
Japan". Secretary of War Stimson wrote in his diary in
late November the following account of discussions with the
President: "the question was how we should maneuver them
into the position of firing the first shot without too much danger
to ourselves. In spite of the risk involved, however, in letting
the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to
have the full support of the American people it was desirable to
make sure that the Japanese be the ones do this so there should
remain no doubt in anyone's mind as to who were the aggressors".

The report of the Army
Pearl Harbor Board (October 20, 1944,) detailed this conscious,
Machiavellian decision to sacrifice lives and equipment in Pearl
Harbor, concluding that during "the fateful period between
November 27 and December 6, 1941? numerous pieces of information
came to our State, War and Navy Departments in all of their top
ranks indicating precisely the intentions of the Japanese
including the probable exact hour and date of the attack"
(Army Board Report, Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 39, pp. 221-30). For
example:

- US intelligence sources learned on November
24th that
"Japanese offensive military operations" had been
set.

- On November 26, "specific evidence
of the Japanese intentions to wage offensive war against Great
Britain and the United States" were obtained by US
intelligence.

- "A concentration of units of the
Japanese fleet at an unknown port ready for offensive action"
was also reported on November 26.

- On December 1, "definite
information came from three independent sources that Japan was
going to attack Great Britain and the United States, but would
maintain peace with Russia".

- On December 3, "the culmination of
this complete revelation of the Japanese intentions as to war and
the attack came? with information that Japanese were destroying
their codes and code machines. This was construed? as meaning
immediate war".

This intelligence information was given to
the highest ranking officials in the War and State Departments,
and shared with the White House, where Roosevelt personally
received twice-daily briefings on intercepted Japanese messages.
Despite the desperate urgings of intelligence officers to send a
"war warning" to military commanders in Hawaii to
prepare for imminent attack, the civilian and military brass
decided against doing so, and instead sent what the board termed
"an innocuous" message.

This evidence of prior
knowledge of the Japanese attack has been confirmed in numerous
sources, including journalists' reports and memoirs of
participants. For example, a United Press dispatch published in
the New York Times on December 8, included the following under the
subhead "Attack Was Expected: It now is possible to reveal
that the United States forces here had known for a week that the
attack was coming and they were not caught unprepared"
(New York Times, December 8, 1941, p.13). In a 1944
interview, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, revealed that "December
7 (?) was far from the shock it proved to be to the country in
general. We had expected something of the sort for a long time"
(New York Times Magazine, October 8, 1944, p.41). On June
20 1944, British Cabinet Minister Sir Oliver Lyttelton told the
American Chamber of Commerce, "Japan was provoked into
attacking the Americans at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of
history ever to say that America was forced into the war. Everyone
knows where American sympathies were. It is incorrect to say that
America was ever truly neutral even before America came into the
war on a fighting basis" (Prang, Pearl Harbor: Verdict of
History, pp 39-40). Winston Churchill confirmed the duplicity of
the American government rulers in the Pearl Harbor attack in this
passage from The Grand Alliance: "A prodigious
Congressional Inquiry published its findings in 1946 in which
every detail was exposed of the events leading up to the war
between the United States and Japan and of the failure to send
positive 'Alert' orders through the military departments to their
fleets and garrisons in exposed situations. Every detail,
including the decoding of secret Japanese telegrams and their
actual texts, has been exposed to the world in forty volumes. The
strength of the United States was sufficient to enable them to
sustain this hard ordeal required by the spirit of the American
Constitution. I do not intend in these pages to attempt to
pronounce judgment upon this tremendous episode in American
history. We know that all the great Americans round the President
and in his confidence felt, as acutely as I did, the awful danger
that Japan would attack British or Dutch possessions in the Far
East, and it would carefully avoid the United States, and that in
consequence Congress would not sanction an American declaration of
war (...) The President and his trusted friends had long realized
the grave risks of United States neutrality in the war against
Hitler and what he stood for, and had writhed under the restraints
of a Congress whose House of Representatives had a few months
before passed by only a single vote the necessary renewal of
compulsory military service, without which their Army would have
been almost disbanded in the midst of the world convulsion.
Roosevelt, Hull, Stimson, Knox, General Marshall, Admiral Stark,
and, as a link between them all, Harry Hopkins, had but one
mind... A Japanese attack upon the United States was a vast
simplification of their problems and their duty. How can we wonder
that they regarded the actual form of the attack, or even its
scale, as incomparably less important than the fact that the whole
American nation would be united for its own safety in a righteous
cause as never before?" (Winston Churchill, "The
Grand Alliance," p. 603).

Roosevelt may not have anticipated the extent
of the damage and casualties that the Japanese would inflict at
Pearl Harbor, but he was clearly prepared to sacrifice American
ships and lives, in order to arouse the population to rage, and to
war.

The Twin Towers and bourgeois
machiavellianism

It is of course more difficult to assess the
level of machiavellianism of the US bourgeoisie in regard to the
Trade Center attack, which occurred less than three months prior
to the writing of this article. We do not have the benefit of
investigations after-the-fact by review boards that might reveal
secret evidence on whether elements of the ruling class had some
complicity in the attacks, or had advance knowledge but permitted
the attacks to occur. But as ruling class history demonstrates,
particularly the events at Pearl Harbor, such a possibility is far
from unthinkable, and if we examine recent events, based solely on
what has been reported in the media - a media incidentally that is
completely enrolled in, and supportive of, the government's
current political and imperialist offensive - we certainly find
circumstantial support for such an hypothesis.

First, if we ask the question, who profits
from the crime, there can be no doubt that the primary beneficiary
of the attack on the World Trade Center has been the American
ruling class. Surely this alone is enough to at least arouse
suspicion. The US bourgeoisie moved swiftly and unrelentingly to
take advantage of 11 September to advance crucial elements of its
domestic and international agenda, including mobilizing the
population behind the state for war, strengthening the repressive
apparatus of the state, and re-asserting American superpower
status in the face of the general tendency for each country to
play its own card in the international arena:

- Immediately after the attacks, the American
political apparatus and mass media were rushed into service to
mobilize the population for war, in a concerted effort to use the
tragedy to overcome definitively the effects of the so-called
"Vietnam Syndrome," which has hampered American
imperialism's ability to wage war for three decades. This
so-called "mass psychological disorder" has been
characterized by a resistance, particularly the working class, to
mobilization behind the state for long term imperialist war, was
largely responsible for the US's heavy reliance on proxy wars in
its conflict with Russian imperialism in the 1970s and '80s, or on
short-term, limited duration military interventions, relying
heavily on air strikes and missile attacks rather than ground
forces, like the Persian Gulf and Kosovo. Of course this
resistance was not the result of some psychological disorder, but
rather a reflection of the ruling class's inability to achieve an
ideological, political defeat of the proletariat, to line up the
current generations of the working class behind the state for
imperialist war as had been done in the preparation for World War
II. The current war psychosis campaign was exemplified by, and
mapped out in, an editorial in a special edition of Time
magazine published immediately after the attack. The thematic
headline for the issue, "Day of Infamy," invoked the
Pearl Harbor comparison right from the beginning, An editorial
column by Lance Morrow, titled "The Case for Rage and
Retribution," outlined the details of the ensuing ideological
campaign. Though written in a mass media publication as part of
the propaganda effort, Morrow's essay gives clear evidence of the
bourgeoisie's conscious understanding of the heightened propaganda
value of the Trade Center attack, compared to previous attacks, to
manipulate the population for war because of large numbers of
casualties and the dramatic visual images:

"A day cannot live in infamy without
the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage.

What's
needed is a unified, unifying Pearl Harbor sort of purple American
fury - a ruthless indignation that doesn't leak away in a week or
two?

This
was terrorism brought to near perfection as a dramatic form. Never
has the evil business had such production values. Normally, the
audience sees only the smoking aftermath - the blown-up embassy,
the ruined barracks, the ship with a blackened hole at the
waterline. This time the first plane striking the first tower
acted as a shill. It alerted the media, brought cameras to the
scene so that might be set up to record the vivid surreal bloom of
the second strike?.

Evil possesses an instinct for theater,
which is why, in an era of gaudy and gifted media, evil may vastly
magnify its damage by he power of horrific images" (Time
magazine, special issue, September, 2001).

- At the same time, the American bourgeois
political apparatus quickly rolled out plans for strengthening the
repressive apparatus of the state, and took immediate action to
implement them. New "security" legislation restoring the
legality of many practices that had been discredited in the
aftermath of the Vietnam war and the Watergate affair, as well as
a whole new arsenal of repressive measures, was drafted, debated,
adopted and signed by the president in record time. We can be
excused if we suspect that the legislation had been drafted
earlier and was being held for the right moment to be introduced.
Over 1,000 "suspects," with Arabic surnames or Muslim
garb being the primary reason for suspicion, were taken into
custody, many held without charges indefinitely. Funds of
organizations suspected of being sympathetic to bin Laden were
frozen, without any court procedure. Restrictions were placed on
immigration, particularly from Islamic countries (more a response
to the bourgeoisie's long standing concerns about the tide of
illegal immigration into the US as people seek to flee the
horrifying conditions of growing decomposition and barbarism in
underdeveloped nations, than anything related to the terrorist
attacks).

- The terrorist crisis became overnight both
the excuse for the worsening economic recession and the
justification for horrendous budget cuts in social programs, as
all available funds were shifted to war and national security. The
rapidity with which these measures were presented reflects the
likelihood that they were not drafted at the spur of the moment,
but had been prepared, discussed and planned on a contingency
basis for some time.

- On the international level, the real
purpose of the war is not so much to destroy terrorism, as it is
to reassert and reaffirm, American imperialism's dominance as the
only remaining superpower in an international arena increasingly
characterized by challenges to US hegemony. The collapse of the
eastern bloc in 1989 quickly led to the unraveling of the western
bloc, as the glue that had held it together - the confrontation
with Russian imperialism and its bloc - had disappeared. Despite
its apparent triumph in the cold war, American imperialism found
itself confronted with a world situation in which its former great
power allies, and numerous lesser powers as well, began to
challenge its leadership and pursue their own imperialist
ambitions. To force its erstwhile allies back into line, and
acknowledge its dominance, the US has undertaken three large scale
military operations in the last decade: against Iraq, against
Serbia, and now Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda network. In each
case, the US military display has forced American "allies,"
like France, Britain and Germany, to join the US-led "alliances"
or face total irrelevancy in the global imperialist chess game.

Second, contrary to the officially sanctioned
version of "reality" that claims an unsuspecting US was
completely blind-sided by the terrorist attacks at the Trade
Center and the Pentagon, based solely on reports in the bourgeois
media, it is possible already to begin to piece together
circumstantial evidence that does not prove but certainly opens up
the possibility of machiavellian maneuvers within the American
bourgeoisie to permit these attacks:

- The forces that seem to have carried out
the Trade Center attack may not have currently been under American
imperialism's control, but they certainly were known to the
American security apparatus and indeed originated as agents of the
CIA. To counter Russian imperialism's invasion of Afghanistan in
1979, the CIA recruited, trained, armed, and supplied thousands of
Islamic fundamentalists to wage a holy war, a jihad, against the
Russians. The concept of jihad had largely been dormant in Islamic
theology, until American imperialism resurrected it for its own
purposes two decades ago. Islamic militants were recruited from
throughout the Muslim world, including Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
This is where Osama Bin Laden first came into the picture, as an
operative of American imperialism. Following the Russian
withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, and the collapse of the
government in Kabul in 1992, American imperialism walked away from
Afghanistan, shifting its focus to the Middle East and the
Balkans. When they fought the Russians, these Islamic
fundamentalists were hailed as freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan.
When they use the same ruthlessness against American imperialism
today, President Bush says they are uncivilized fanatics who have
to be destroyed. In much the same way as Timothy McVeigh, the
American right-wing fanatic responsible for 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing, who was raised on the cold war ideology and imbued with
hatred of the Russians, and recruited to the US military, the
young men recruited to the CIA's jihad knew only hatred and
warfare their entire adult lives. Both felt betrayed by American
imperialism after the cold war had ended, and turned their
violence against their former masters.

- Since 1996, the FBI had been investigating
the possibility that terrorists were using American aviation
schools to learn how to fly jumbo jets, so the entire modus
operandi of the terrorists had been anticipated by authorities
("FBI failed to find suspects named before hijackings,"
Guardian, September 25, 2001).

- The apartment in Germany, where the Trade
Center attacks had been planned and coordinated had been under
German police surveillance for nearly three years.

- The FBI and other American intelligence
agencies had received warnings of, and intercepted messages about,
a planned spectacular terrorist attack, timed to coincide with the
anniversary of the White House Rose Garden ceremony with Clinton,
Rabin and Arafat. Both Israeli and French intelligence agencies
had sent warnings to the Americans. So, American authorities
certainly had advance notice about when the attack would come.
Perhaps it was not clear that the target would be the World Trade
Center, but the Center had already been targeted by Islamic
terrorists for attack in 1993, as a symbol of American capitalism.

- In August, the FBI had arrested Zacarias
Moussaoui, who had aroused suspicions when he sought pilot
training at a flight school in Minnesota and mentioned that he was
not interesting in learning how to take off or land. In early
September, French authorities had sent a warning about Moussaoui's
suspected terrorist links. In November, the FBI suddenly reversed
itself and denied Moussaoui's involvement in the plot. But in any
case, suspicions about pilots not interested in taking off or
landing, hinting at the possibility of a suicide hijacking, were
revived.

- Mohamed Atta, the supposed ringleader of
11 September, who allegedly piloted the first plane to hit the
Twin Towers was well known to authorities, but seemed to have led
a charmed life, and was allowed to remain at large in the US.
Despite the fact that Atta was listed for years on the State
Department's terrorist watch-list because of his suspected
involvement in a 1986 bus bombing in Israel, he was permitted
repeatedly to enter, leave and return to the US. From January to
May 2000 he was under surveillance by US agents following his
suspicious purchase of large amounts of chemicals, which might be
used to make explosives. In January 2001 he was held by
Immigration and Nationalization agents at Miami International
Airport for 57 minutes because he had previously overstayed a
visa, and because he did not have a proper visa to enter the US to
study at a flight school in Florida. Despite being on the State
Department watch-list, despite the FBI's concern that terrorists
might be attending flight schools in the US, he was permitted to
enter the US, to enroll in flight school. In April 2001 Atta was
stopped by police for driving without a license. When he failed to
show up in court in May, a bench warrant was issued for his
arrest, but it was never executed. He was arrested for drunk
driving on two other occasions. Atta never made any attempt to
operate under an alias during his entire time in the US,
traveling, living and studying at the flight school under his real
name. Was the FBI grossly incompetent, or hampered by a lack of
Arabic agents and translators as the FBI claims, or is there a
more machiavellian explanation for the authorities constantly and
consistently permitting him to remain at large - was he being
"protected" or set up as a fall guy? ("Terrorists
Among Us," Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sept 16,
2001)

- August 23, 2001, the CIA sent a list of 100
suspected members of Osama bin Laden's network, who were
reportedly in or on their way to the US, including Khalid
al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi who were on board the plane that hit
the Pentagon.

- Long before the supposedly unexpected
attacks of 11 September, the US had been secretly laying the
groundwork for war in Afghanistan for nearly three years.
Following the attacks on US embassies in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania
and Nairobi, Kenya in 1998, President Clinton had authorized the
CIA to prepare for possible action against the out-of-control Bin
Laden. At this level secret contacts and negotiations began with
the governments of the former USSR republics of Uzbekistan and
Tajikistan to arrange for military bases, supply operations, and
intelligence gathering. Not only did this prepare the way for
military intervention in Afghanistan, but it also opened up
significant American inroads into the Russian sphere of influence
in Central Asia. In this sense, despite its claims of being taken
by surprise, the US was poised to immediately pounce on the
opportunity offered by the Twin Towers attack to push forward with
a number of strategic and tactical measures that had been in the
planning stages for a long time.

- The cornerstone of the ideological campaign
immediately launched around the Twin Towers disasters has been the
devastating destruction and death toll. For weeks government
officials and the media have drummed into our heads that nearly
6,000 lives were lost at the Trade Center - twice the death toll
at Pearl Harbor. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
repeated these numbers in an interview on a national television
broadcast in early November.2
Yet there is every indication that these statistics, with their
emotional propaganda value, are greatly inflated by the
government. Independent tallies compiled by news agencies put the
total at under 3,000, roughly equivalent to the loss of life at
Pearl Harbor. For example, the New York Times puts the total at
2,943, Associated Press at 2,625, and USA Today at 2,680. The
American Red Cross, which is distributing financial grants to
families of the victims has only processed applications from 2,563
families. Government officials refused to comply with a request
from the Red Cross for a copy of its still secret official list of
Trade Center victims ("Numbers vary in tallies of the
victims" New York Times , October 25, 2001, B1). Meanwhile,
politicians and broadcast media continue to use the more
propagandistically valuable, larger inflated number of 5,000-6,000
dead and missing, which is by now imbedded in popular
consciousness.

- The US government has never publicly
revealed its "evidence" of bin Laden's responsibility
for the Trade Center. And then as the war progressed, the Bush
administration announced that, if captured alive, bin Laden would
be tried in a secret military tribunal, in order not to make
public the sources of evidence against him. Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld clearly signaled his preference that bin Laden be killed
rather than captured in order to skip a trial. It is only natural
to wonder why the US is in so concerned to keep its alleged
"evidence" a secret.

None of this constitutes positive proof that
either the Administration, or perhaps the CIA, had prior knowledge
of the Twin Towers attacks and permitted them to happen, but one
doesn't have to be a conspiracy buff to have his suspicions
raised.

Is the Twin Towers a modern day Pearl
Harbor?

Contrary to the media's insistence, the
current situation cannot be equated to Pearl Harbor on the
historic level. Pearl Harbor came at the end of nearly twenty
years of political defeats that had vanquished the world
proletariat politically, ideologically and even physically, and
opened up an historic course towards imperialist war. These
defeats were of momentous historic weight on the proletariat: the
failure of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary wave; the
degeneration of the revolutionary regime in Russia, and the
triumph of state capitalism under Stalin; the degeneration of the
Communist International into a foreign policy arm of the Russian
state, including a wholesale retreat from the revolutionary class
positions promulgated at the height of the revolutionary wave; the
integration of the Communist parties into their respective state
apparatuses; the political and physical defeat of the working
class at the hands of fascism in Italy, Germany, and Spain; and
the triumph of the ideology of anti-fascism in the so-called
"democratic" countries.

The cumulative impact of these defeats was to
profoundly limit the historic possibilities for the workers
movement. Revolution, which had been on the agenda in the period
following 1917, was now on the historic backburner. The balance of
forces had shifted definitively towards the capitalist class,
which now had the upper hand in moving towards imposing its
"solution" to the historic crisis of global capitalism:
world war. However, the fact that the rapport de forces between
the classes had shifted in its favor didn't mean that the
bourgeoisie necessarily had a free hand to impose its political
will. But even the course towards war didn't mean that the
American bourgeoisie could automatically unleash imperialist war
at given moment. The bourgeoisie still faced resistance to war
within the American proletariat in 1939-41, in part reflecting the
vacillating position of the Stalinist party which enjoyed
considerable influence, especially in the CIO unions, due to
Moscow's wavering line during the period of the non-aggression
pact with Nazi Germany. The dominant faction of the US bourgeoisie
also had to deal with recalcitrant elements within its own class,
some who were sympathetic to the Axis powers, or others who
maintained an isolationist perspective. As we have seen an
"unprovoked" attack by Japan provided the pretext for
rallying all the wavering elements behind the state and the coming
war effort. In this sense, Pearl Harbor was the final nail in the
political, ideological coffin.

The situation is very different today. True,
the Twin Towers disaster comes after more than a decade of
political disorientation and confusion sown by the collapse of the
Stalinist regimes in Europe and the ideological campaigns of the
bourgeoisie about the death of communism. But these confusions
have not had the same political weight as the defeats of the
1920s/30s on the consciousness of the proletariat on the historic
level. Nor did they mean a change in the historic course towards
class confrontations. Despite disorientation, the working class
was struggling to regain its terrain, and there were abundant
signs of the process of subterranean maturation of consciousness,
and the emergence of searching elements and a growing milieu
around existing proletarian revolutionary groups. There is no
attempt here to minimize the political disorientation within the
working class ever since 1989, a situation that has been
aggravated by decomposition, creating a situation where the slide
into barbarism did not necessarily require World War to be
achieved. While the American bourgeoisie is enjoying considerable
success with its ideological offensive, even if for the moment
workers are caught up in the war psychosis to an alarming degree,
the global balance of class forces is not determined by the
situation in a single country, even one as important as the US. On
the international level, the proletariat is still undefeated and
the perspective is still one of class confrontation. Even in the
US, this international working class capacity to continue the
struggle was echoed by the two-week strike by 23,000 public sector
workers in Minnesota in October. Despite being attacked for being
"unpatriotic" or striking at a moment of national
crisis, these workers nonetheless stood their ground and struck
for improved wages and benefits. While Pearl Harbor was the final
punctuation mark in the fulfillment of the process of bringing to
fruition the course towards imperialist war in 1941, the Trade
Center is a setback for the proletariat, especially the
proletariat in the US, but within the context of a general
historic situation that still favors the proletariat.